


Night's Whisper

by Subtle_Salieri



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Alliteration, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Creepy, Drabble, Fetishism, Gen, Literal objectification, Not really a ship fic, Objectification, Other, Vraska is not nice here im sorry, i just couldn't not write something when i had the idea, murderfic, seriously this shit alliterates a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 00:53:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14533152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Subtle_Salieri/pseuds/Subtle_Salieri
Summary: Vraska centric drabble theorizing about an alternate outcome from The Gorgon and The Guildpact. Jace is there too, sort of.





	Night's Whisper

She still thought of it as he. She felt no desire to cleave it to pieces, or pulverize it, much less sink it in the depths of the canals that crossed the districts of city where sand and pebble beds gave way over decades to victims of the city, of the guilds They found their final resting place there, no recollection of who they were to be found among the city’s consciousness, ensconced under dark water as light watercraft passed between these dead and aging stonework archways packed with bustling city life.

This one looked desperate, stubborn, perhaps a bit sad or regretful, bargaining… but the normative fear, abject terror, the emotion she had expected to be chiseled in granite across his face, after the petrification dispelled any glamours he used to hide himself from a watching world… The Guildpact refused to express even in the final milliseconds as she finally locked his sea-blue, youthful but surprisingly tired eyes with hers and they went the color of ash, one arm raised in the process of a conjuration that would never come.

She rather liked that the hood on his elaborate cloak had fallen to his fairly narrow shoulders before the visage-defining moment, giving her a better look at the unkempt mop trimmed close towards the nape of his neck. Admiring her own work wasn’t a habit of Vraska’s – what vanity of vanities, what a waste of passion better used furthering her goals – but she felt an interest as she ran a few fingers around the curve of his ear, surprised by an assortment of piercings now one with the lobe that had the pleasingly rough craftsmanship of Gruul ornamentation. She studied how his young, round face with the pad of her thumb, observing that it had been battered a bit in his lifespan – a nose that surely had broken a time or two, a slightly offset jaw, parted lips revealing chipped teeth giving such a fresh “sculpture” a worn look. As did the welts that Vraska’s own tendrils had raised only moments prior tightening around a delicate neck strained to the side – a last attempt to avoid the glow of her gaze. She stroked the roughness of the raised bumps she had inflicted as she held him him at her lack of mercy for a planeswalker with the hubris to dictate how a plane he had to claim to would operate. Her spark ignited through the injustice and abuse inflicted by the guilds that held the power denied to the lower ranked, to the guildless, to those ground under the heel of brutes – as she had learned of Jace’s politicking and bureaucracy it stoked a fury in her heart, focused at the pomposity of an interloper impeding her mission to eradicate the legally-immune criminals who left her bleeding and weakened and vulnerable, tossed in a foul prison thoughtlessly like trash. Now so many of them were rubble.

Vraska would have liked if he had heard out her proposal, though. She would have immediately deposed Jarad, she thought as she moved her hand from his neck to his outstretched hand, twisting her spindly fingers between the stiff stone as if in a danse macabre with this exquisite corpse. He would not have been so hard to train as an assistant, perhaps even accomplice. The Guildpact’s apparent expression of a mostly-internalized guilt and grief she caught from the corner of her eye as she uttered the name of the swordsman who would still live if not for being tangled in his meddlesome mistakes would have been so easy to play against any rebellious streak he may have possessed – failing her would not have been a regular occurrence. She placed her other hand on the ridge of belts crossing his midsection, playing her fingers across buckles and closures and pouches closed to her sharpened grasp.

He would have adjusted well, she was sure. He had no stomach for killing, that much was clear, but he’d surely begin to understand that Ravnica’s regimes required radical reshaping to liberate the lowly and the lost.

Her hand traced up marvelously fluid, frozen former fabric back to the intriguing piercings, grazing the faintest, scarified impression of the tattoos she assumed continued below his elaborate garment. All the information acquired from Dimir brokers couldn’t solidify how much of his life he had been on the plane, and she wondered for a second if he too had spent the last gasps of childhood into his teens cheating as much out of the city before it cheated him of everything like it did to the countless homeless, guildless, pitiful children that Vraska had found herself among, but distanced from even then.

Who could blame those desperates, though? Right in front of her stood an exemplary reason gorgons generally find themselves to be less comfortable company.

It could have been quite comfortable company if only he’d given her a bit more time to explain. The light he’d seen wouldn’t have been the angry flash of her glare. His inadequacy in close combat aside, his intelligence and dedication to whatever charge he placed on himself would have served so well… And made, perhaps, for better company than a handful of sycophantic psychopaths. 

She leaned close and murmured to the statue, “I rather wish you’d considered it.” She took a final look at him, stuck the point of a talon through a loop hanging from his left ear, and bent the joint in her finger until it snapped off cleanly. She held it in her palm, before turning, brushing against her masterpiece mind sculpture with the writhing tendrils, and closed her fist around the little totem stripped from him. It. 

Vraska had work to do now that she had to rely on the backup plan, without the Guildpact.


End file.
